Oracle Blog

Availability Engineering

Wednesday Dec 03, 2008

Following our recent Open CLARC inception review of the Open HA Cluster (OHAC) agent for xVM Hypervisor guest domains, I thought a small 5 minute demo would be of interest.

Please hit the download key from the demo link to stream the demo, which can be found at the HA-xVM project page.

The demo is based on Solaris Express Community Edition build 86 and Solaris Cluster Express 2/08 simply to reflect the cheat sheet from the link above. The purpose of the demo was to show the following:

Show that an OHAC resource group managing an xVM guest domain via an OHAC resource can switch an xVM guest domain from one node to another using live migration. What's not shown is that the OHAC interconnects are used for the live migration.

Show that an OHAC managed xVM guest domain can survive a node crash.

In particular, within the demo RG1 manages xVM domain domu1. RG1 is then switched from node podio2 to node podio1 and domu1 is subsequently live migrated between the two nodes. While RG1/domu1 is online on podio1 that node podio1 is crashed via "uadmin 2 1". OHAC automatically detects that failure and restarts domu1 on podio2.

As always, the devil is in the details. The following table summarizes some of the reasons why this isn't just a "recompile and run" experience:

Work Area

Solaris Express Community Edition

OpenSolaris Binary Distribution

Packaging System

System V packages

Image Packaging System (IPS)

Zones support

native and lx brand type

ipkg brand type

KSH version

KSH88, KSH93

KSH93

Web-based system management for applications

Sun Java Web Console (webconsole)

not provided

Encumbered Solaris code

CDE, Motif, ToolTalk

not contained by design

Supported Platforms

SPARC, i386/x64

i386/x64 only (to date)

Installer

Supports network (JumpStart), text, and graphical installation

Supports graphical installation only (to date)

Preferred Compiler

Studio 11, soon Studio 12

StudioExpress

You can read here more details about each point listed within the table.

Besides solving the above challenges, we also want to offer some new possibilities within Colorado. You can read the details within the umbrella requirement specification. There are separate requirement specifications to outline specific details for the planned private-interconnect changes, cluster infrastructure changes involving the weaker membership, enhancements to make the proxy file system (PxFS) optional, and changes to use iSCSI with ZFS for non-shared storage configurations.

Monday May 12, 2008

From 28th till 31th of May 2008, Berlin will become the center of Europe's Linux and open source movement. LinuxTag attracts over 10,000 IT decision-makers, trade visitors, developers, media representatives, and other interested visitors from 30 countries.

With over 80 exhibitors of free projects, LinuxTag is the world's largest platform for open-source software projects, offering you the chance to meet directly with their developers and talk about the latest trends.

For more than a decade, LinuxTag has featured its proven crowd magnets, the high-caliber lectures, conferences and tutorials, and the Business and Government Conference.